2020 election

Six months ago, you would have predicted a Joe Biden win in the Iowa caucuses. Four months ago, Pete Buttigieg looked like the favorite. Twenty-four hours ago, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders seemed set to storm to victory. But no one foresaw an outcome this disastrous for the Democratic party. Precinct captains across the Hawkeye state reported faults with an app used in the caucuses for the first time. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Iowa Democratic party described 'inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results': 'In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report.

The term ‘social justice warrior’ is usually a pejorative hurled at those who hold socially progressive views, particularly those who take their views to extremes. But there is genuine injustice in American society. A host of groups have been oppressed for too long due to their gender, sexual orientation, race or other categorizations. Protecting the civil liberties of these groups has usually been a task of the left or the minority of libertarians on the right. Now, that task falls to Donald Trump.

The Senate is not going to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and to all appearances the whole thing is nearly over. Acquittal is imminent, and supposedly serious commentators are on Twitter wailing in unison with Democratic activists. But what they are saying does not make any sense — it’s contradictory. On the one hand, they say that the case against Donald Trump is open-and-shut: so utterly persuasive in objective terms that only the Senate Republicans’ bad faith has prevented them from admitting it.

Anti-virus pioneer and globe-trotting eccentric John McAfee placed third in the 2016 Libertarian party presidential primaries. Now he’s running again, this time from a secure, undisclosed location likely on a boat outside the United States, which he fled last January allegedly to escape the IRS Although that sounds like an ideal setting for a Libertarian presidential campaign, McAfee doesn’t think too much of his chances of being their nominee. ‘It doesn’t really matter to me either way,’ he told me. ‘Number one, I’m John McAfee. I can’t be president. If anyone thinks I can, they need to move out of their mother’s basement and see the world. Neither can any Libertarian candidate. Ever.

As a twenty-something man who spends excessive amounts of time on the internet I have of course watched countless hours of The Joe Rogan Experience. Like any viewer, I know the martial artist-cum comedian-cum-actor-cum-commentator-cum-podcaster's irritating traits. He is morbidly obsessed with mind-altering drugs. He has a dilettante's weakness for pseudoscience. Worst of all, he — or, at least, his production company — censors people who make fun of his friends, despite his oft-expressed opposition to censorship. But whatever our complaints with the joke-cracking, pad-kicking, pot-smoking, elk-killing renaissance man we have to admire the range of his talents and the scale of his energy. And, besides, listen to anyone talking for hours and you will find a lot to dislike.

Just four months ago, Elizabeth Warren seemed poised to storm the Democratic nomination. In the first days of October, she briefly eclipsed Joe Biden atop the polls. Her supposed rival on the left, Bernie Sanders, had just suffered a heart attack. His candidacy appeared to be fading. Suddenly, Warren was all the rage: she was a woman, which matters a lot to the Democratic media. She talked like a radical leftie, but she didn’t frighten the establishment horses in the way Bernie did. The bookmakers made her strong favorite to win: everybody assumed Warren would hoover up Sanders’s votes as his presidential aspirations vanished once again. Well, the opposite has happened. Bernie Sanders’s campaign has ended up devouring Warren’s.

After all the fakery of the 2016 election, the hot sauce in her bag, the ‘chillin’ in Cedar Rapids’, Hillary Clinton has finally told, ahem, her truth. And that truth is that she really hates Bernie Sanders. It’s a truth clear to anyone who had watched them during their last go-round. She bristled when she spoke to him. This nothing socialist from some state with three electors was trying to defeat her, Hillary Clinton, whose turn it was to be president. It was obvious. But then suddenly, when the 2016 primary was over, she needed him. His voters were angry. He had lost and it seemed like the fix was in. Hillary needed them to show up for her, so she put on her best smile and made nice with Bernie Sanders.

The single most important thing to understand about the Senate impeachment trial is that it is all for show, meant to influence the November election. Yes, the House managers and president’s attorney will present formal arguments to the Senate. The real argument, though, is intended for the public in 10 months. It always has been. That argument will play out in the media and on the campaign trail.There are three sets of elections that matter: presidential ballots in six or seven contested states (the industrial Midwest, Florida, and a few others), Senate ballots in Maine, Colorado, Arizona, Iowa and North Carolina (where Republican incumbents are vulnerable), and about 30 Democratic House members in red districts, whose fate will decide the next Speaker.

The stench of beer and cheap deodorant filled the bar in which the ‘Bernie Bros’ were meeting. The scene looked straight out of Fight Club except that the young men assembled there were hairier and none of them had abs.Your humble correspondent watched as the barman prepared a cocktail that combined Jack Daniel’s and Monster Energy.‘What's that?’‘Our speciality,’ he said, ‘It's called “Hillary Clinton's Tears”.’‘I'll have a Coke,’ I said. (I was driving.)‘What are you?’ he sneered, ‘some kind of woman?’I surveyed the crowd. Most of the men were bearded. About half of them were bespectacled. They were all either obese or rail thin. Some of them were gaming. Some of them were podcasting.

We were four minutes in, somewhere on the outskirts of Mideast foreign policy, when the boredom began to take hold. ‘They couldn’t find some of Iowa’s world-renowned meth to spice this stage up at bit’, I muttered, as I cracked open another beer and wondered who I crossed at The Spectator that I’m asked to watch these damn Democrat debates each month. Just 19 days before the Iowa caucuses, we finally reached the inevitable: Andrew Yang getting the boot, as the white savior party shed the last of its racial minority aspirants, having decided that none was qualified to take the helm this cycle. Better luck in 2024, blacks.

The next time Elizabeth Warren offers you a beer, be sure not to turn your back on her lest she crack you across the back of the head with it. That's the message the Warren camp has sent out with the latest Liz-Bernie spat — just in time for the seventh (I know!) Democratic debate in Iowa tonight. Pulling a dirty trick worthy of Roger Stone, Warren's associates briefed CNN about a December 2018 meeting between the two senators, during which Sanders allegedly said 'he did not believe a woman could win.' Saagar Enjeti of The Hill lays out the apparent Warren strategy nicely: 'Progressives. Allow me introduce you to the media ecosystem that has bedeviled conservatives in the Trump age: Step 1) Leak a bullshit smear sans any real confirmation to CNN.

There’s a funny silence where the complaints about ‘money in politics’ used to be. The latest numbers on amounts spent on TV ads have billionaires Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer at $153.1 million and $116.5 million, respectively. Yet no viral pieces have been written, no passionate speeches given about their corrupting influence. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have given lip service to them, sure, but it’s been very muted. Warren told Rachel Maddow that Bloomberg is ‘skipping the democracy part of this’ because his lack of fundraising means he can’t participate in the debates. Of course, anyone who tells you they believe Warren actually would want Bloomberg in the debates is lying to you.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Galileo famously said that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. But what made him so important in the history of science was his further insight that mathematics, in order to reveal the laws of nature, had to be empirically tested. Mathematical formulae described what he thought would happen; he had to clamber up the leaning tower of Pisa and drop the two balls to convince us that objects of different masses fall at the same speed. I am not sure that most modern pollsters have taken Galileo’s second insight fully on board. The modern pollster tends to be in love with his model.